angiEmedia

NOTE: This collaboratively written article incorporates text by multiple authors including Rob, Alison, and Chris.

Divorce is one of the most stressful experiences most people endure, right up there with a death in the family, job loss and extended unemployment, or a medical catastrophe such as cancer. When you add to the mix a child custody battle with a Personality Disordered Abuser as your adversary, you will likely experience years of false allegations, be kicked out of your home, see your kids and family suffer the abuse of parental alienation, experience frequent misconduct by the courts, see your reputation ruined by defamation, suffer job loss and chronic underemployment or unemployment, and many other damages. During such a hellish experience, it is only natural to be depressed, anxious, and suffer chronic sleep problems. The continual stress results in what may initially appear as psychological problems but which inevitably result in physiological damage to one’s health.

Many suffering from this nightmare will seek medical help from their general practitioner or psychiatrist. At some level they know the stress-related symptoms they are experiencing are not “all in their heads” as some may claim. Sometimes medical practitioners do help, other times they begin another series of upsets to their patient’s health. That’s because the mainstream therapies used by many doctors often include too quickly prescribing common antidepressants and anxiolytic medications that have a plethora of adverse effects on health. Fortunately, there are alternatives that can often help without the need for these medications or can help to reduce the prescription medication dosages required and thereby help avert some of the worst of the side effects.

Psychotherapy Is Not A Cure

When you visit your doctor or psychiatrist and explain how you can’t sleep and are depressed and anxious from the horrors of the family law system, first of all you should realize that most of these medical practitioners don’t really understand you or your situation. Unless one has been through the nightmare of the family law courts or has seen the destruction they inflict upon a close family member or friend, it’s hard to have any real understanding of this miserable reality.

Some medical providers may brush off your request for medication, pointing out that your stress is temporary and will go away in a few months and advise you to see a psychologist or therapist. While good psychologists and therapists can certainly provide some help, what they can do is often not enough as the manifestations of the family law crisis often include physiological illness brought on by chronic stress.

Many psychotherapists simply aren’t much use in such difficult situations. First of all, for a chance of good results you must find one who has some experience with the family law system and forms of child abuse including parental alienation. If you pick a therapist who has never set foot in a family court room and seen how dysfunctional the system is, you are far less likely to get competent treatment or helpful advice.

Many psychotherapists have zero experience in family law battles. They may be experts at substance abuse, marital arguments, or helping people suffering job loss but know nothing about extreme divorce and child custody battles. Even those who do have some experience often lack a full appreciation of how abusive, arbitrary, and destructive the family law courts are to their victims and how it frequently takes nothing but an unproven false allegation to put a good parent who has broken no laws and abused nobody into a no-contact or expensive supervised visitation situation that is itself a form of emotional abuse.

Naive therapists may be operating under the mistaken impression that you can’t be kicked out of your home and have all your property and assets taken from you without a chance to present your side of the story or at least some evidence of wrongdoing. But in today’s family law courts, it is not unusual for that to happen. One lie is all it takes to ruin months or years of the lives of the falsely accused parent and his or her children. A second lie is often all it takes to amplify the damage tenfold. The general public fails to understand this, and so do most therapists.

A really excellent therapist for you should also be expertly familiar with personality disorders and sociopathic abuse patterns. Some therapists run away from personality disorder cases as fast as they can. They know how dangerous these people can be to them personally. Others are totally ignorant of how destructive personality disorders can be to the misfortunate ones who married and/or had children with a person suffering one of the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B personality disorders including Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Antisocial personality disorders. Ideally, you want a therapist who knows a lot about personality disorders and is brave enough to help you face off with one of these people. “Brave” applies here because it is common for the Personality Disordered Abuser to seek to defame and even file complaints seeking to revoke the license of a therapist who dares to challenge their abusive behaviors or help their victims.

Unfortunately, finding a suitable therapist is often very difficult to do. For many people, joining a high conflict divorce or parental alienation support group or web discussion forum and asking for referrals from the people there may be one of the few realistic means they have to find a therapist who might be of some help.

If you are fortunate enough to find a good therapist familiar with family court abuse, you are likely to get some useful support and advice that may help you weather the long storm. But even when you have found a good therapist and are starting to build some rapport, the odds are strong that by then you will be suffering physiological symptoms of extreme stress that even an excellent therapist cannot resolve. Lots of talk therapy isn’t enough on its own to turn around severe depression, anxiety, or sleep disorders. Realizing this, you’ll probably go back to your doctor again looking for medical help.

Psychiatric Medicines Are Not Panaceas or Candy

After hearing that you’ve got a psychotherapist and are still suffering, even conservative doctors are going to whip out the prescription pad if they haven’t already. They are likely to quickly prescribe an antidepressant, an anxiolytic, and possibly a sleep medication from their list of favorites. Every doctor has favorite meds, ones they have used for years or new ones they want to try because they got a box full of samples or a fancy $100 surf ‘n turf dinner, golf outing, or a week long tropical vacation in the dead of winter from a big pharma rep pushing a lucrative new pill. So what you will be prescribed may often have little or nothing to do with what will actually work.
Read more…

Eileen Lasher of the California Coalition for Families and Children was interviewed twice in 2011 by Walter Davis on his show Progress in San Diego. Dr. Emad Tadros, an outspoken critic of the San Diego family courts, joined them in the first interview. The second interview was shown in two segments.

In the interview segment below, Lasher discussed her experiences with the misconduct of minor’s counsel attorneys and how taxpayers and parents are paying for what is in her view an organized criminal enterprise. She says children and parents are being abused by the courts and points out the taxpayers and the abused parents are paying the financial costs for this misconduct.

San Diego Family Courts: Organized Crime Ring Targeting Middle and Upper Classes

Lasher contends the San Diego family law courts are operated as a criminal business that siphons the wealth from families and places it in the hands of the attorneys and experts such as custody evaluators. She views judges who appoint custody evaluators and minor’s counsel attorneys and many of those attorneys as particularly culpable. A minor’s counsel attorney is to participate in a custody case by representing the children. However, such attorneys often have conflicts of interest. They also typically run their own family law attorney business and are also in some cases are attorneys who are involved in probate cases and serve as “pro tem” judges in family law court.

Discussion focused on how low income families seldom have minor’s counsel attorneys and psychological evaluators ordered by the courts. These families have little money, so it is not lucrative to put them through the family court extortion process reserved for people who have some money. Middle income or higher income families often suffer from these expensive costs because they have significant assets and income that can be exploited by the divorce industry.

You have a house, so the attorneys and court want your house to be forced into sale so they can keep the proceeds and ensure their own wealth and job security at the expense of you and your children. You have retirement savings, the attorneys want those, too. There are college savings for the kids? Those can be raided, too.

How better to extort all or nearly all of a family’s wealth than to threaten their children? The attorneys and judges know how lucrative this extortion is and are eager to bring it into play when they see income and assets that can be pillaged.

If the parents don’t have substantial assets, the grandparents might. The court and its allies know that threatening their grandchildren is often an equally effective means to “financially gang rape” the family.

Generally speaking, San Diego family law courts operate by finanically raping the parents and deep-sixing their children’s futures. While there are probably some judges in the system who do not approve of the corruption and criminal conduct of other judges, it is evident that many do. It is in the judge’s own self-serving interests to increase the amount of litigation in the system. Busy inefficient courts mean more judges are “needed.” It is also in their interests to line the pockets of their attorney and custody evaluator friends, many of whom contribute to judicial re-election campaign funds or who may support them in future runs for political offices. And if they decide not to run for re-election, having funneled millions into the hands of their friends makes it easier for them to secure other employment in the same corrupt divorce industry.
Read more…

There has been much mainstream media coverage of the controversy over the illegal banning of the The Psyco Ex Wife website. Many of the mainstream media writers pump up sympathy-evoking statements, particularly those coming from Allison Morelli who is the woman reputed to be the PEW (Psycho Ex Wife) character discussed on the site. As an example, I’ve seen variations of this statement reported by UPI and other publications:

Quoted from Man’s divorce blog starts free speech dispute:

Allison Morelli said she just wants the legal battle to end.

A person who has not had experience interacting with sociopaths is easily led into feeling sympathy by statements like this.

But anybody who is familiar with the workings of the mind of the devious sociopathic liars who pervade family law courts must ask, what does such a statement really mean? In my experience, statements such as “I just want the litigation to end” are warning flags. You should stop to think long and hard about what they really mean.

Healthy people certainly would have a reason for making such a statement. When they say something like this, they mean they want to stay out of court, or that they want some fair resolution to the dispute and then to be done with it and put it behind them.

But sociopaths mean something completely different. They often make such comments not for honest reasons but to manipulate you and to gain allies.
Read more…

In June 2011, Judge Diane E. Gibbons of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, illegally ordered an excellent web site called The Psycho Ex Wife to be taken down in violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. The site is reportedly owned by a Pennsylvania woman named Misty Weaver-Ostinato whose partner for the last several years has been a man named Anthony Morelli. On the site, they identified themselves as DW and “Mister M” never using their real names or identifying information, nor the real name or identifying information of Morelli’s ex who allegedly inspired the site with her behaviors.

First Amendment rights expert Eugene Volokh writes that he believes this order is blatantly unconstitutional, especially because of its expansiveness:

from “Father Shall Take Down That Web Site and Shall Never on Any Public Media Make Any Reference to Mother At All,”

If the father says anything about the mother in public, he could be sent to jail for contempt of court. The order isn’t limited to banning libelous statements (though I think even such a much narrower ban would itself pose constitutional problems, especially under Pennsylvania law), nor is it even limited to statements about minor children (though even that sort of order strikes me as constitutionally impermissible). Rather, the court order categorically orders the removal of a Web site, and prohibits all public statements — factually accurate or not — by one person about another person.

Allison Morelli apparently claims that PEW (the abbreviation for “Psycho Ex Wife”, one of the main characters discussed on the site) is her, even though nobody is ever identified or named on the site. According to reports in other publications, PEW served as the source for around a quarter of the articles describing bizarre and abusive behaviors on the banned website.

Allison, for reasons that don’t make any sense to me at all, wants us all to believe that PEW is her and therefore the whole site is an attack on her. She claims the site is about her without naming or identifying her or anybody else. She simultaneously implies or maintains that she didn’t behave as the PEW character behaved but somehow she knows they were writing the site about her to attack her. This makes no sense to me, nor does it to much of anybody else except apparently Allison Morelli, her supporters, and Judge Gibbons.

The PEW character may not be meant to be literally interpreted. The words and actions appear to be what you could see as a synthesis of behaviors and conduct of more than one troubled ex-spouse. Certainly describing a person as looking like “Jabba the Hut” (a description used for PEW) is obviously figurative speech that no rational person is going to believe is a literal statement. Yet Allison Morelli claims the site is about her and is an attack on her, all the while trying to imply or claim she didn’t write the emails or do the actions described. But somehow she “knows” it is all about her.

However much literary license may have been taken with PEW’s words and actions and no matter what victimhood badge Allison is trying to win with her weird assertions, it is clear that “PEW” as used on the site often does not even refer to Allison Morelli even if you believe it sometimes does.

PEW is used to refer not just to the PEW character but also as a generic abbreviation throughout the site’s content. It means different things in different places. This abbreviation is often used to refer to any generic “psycho ex wife” or at times even more broadly any “psycho ex” regardless of gender or marital status.

Even the readers of the site used such terms to describe their own conflicts. “PEW” is frequently used to generically refer to a “psycho ex wife” or to some other unnamed specific ex-wife that could not be Allison Morelli, unless of course she wants to claim she has been married to dozens or hundreds of the readers and they are all writing about her, too.

The site and its readers also use “PEH” to refer to “psycho ex husband” which can’t be about her. Or can it? If she were to claim she was a man named Alfred in some past life and therefore any references to “PEH” are about her, too, from her actions to date it looks like Judge Gibbons would be convinced by that argument.

The generic “psycho ex” content and discussion included all the kinds of things you’d expect to see discussed about malicious Borderlines, Narcissists, Antisocials, and other personality disorders that are typically seen in sociopaths. These include drug abuse, alcohol abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, manipulation, projection, gaslighting, pathological lying, distortion campaigns, and more. They even discussed at times how these people get to be their malicious selves, often from a history of abuse as children. All of that is very generic and helpful information that doesn’t specifically pertain to Allison Morelli. Some of it may not have been written to have anything to do with her. Yet Judge Gibbons, in her infinite stupidity, sought to silence all of that content, too, because she apparently is unable or unwilling to differentiate between content that is widely and generally applicable and not specific to any one person and content (be it information or misinformation) that has to do with the Morelli dispute in particular.

Unfortunately for the operators of the site and its readers, Judge Gibbons does not seem able to ask basic questions about how an anonymous site naming and identifying nobody but quoting bizarre and abusive emails and describing similar behaviors could be about a person unless that person is also in effect admitting she is behind those words and actions.

Gibbons must also have failed her Constitutional Law classes on the First Amendment, nor does she understand that even if there was some defamatory or harassing statement on the site that this does not justify banning all the content. She evidently can’t comprehend or doesn’t care that roughly 2/3 or more of the material on the site wasn’t even about the PEW character and therefore could not have been about the Morelli dispute, even if Allison wants people to believe she is the PEW character.

Did Gibbons even review the site? By the appearance of the alleged transcripts I’ve seen so far, it looks like she just took Allison’s word for it when she moved to ban the site.

Take Down the Site Or Go To Prison

The judge stated among other things that if the site was not taken down, she would imprison Anthony and take away his kids. Here’s a direct quote from the alleged June 6, 2011 transcript:

THE COURT:
Father shall take down that website and shall never on any public media make any reference to the mother at all, nor any reference to the the relationship between mother and children, nor shall he make any reference to his children other than “happy birthday” or other significant school events. The father’s girlfriend shall not be referred to as mother and father shall not in any way interfere with mother’s relationship with her children.

Mother will not consume any alcohol at all and will continue in alcohol treatment.

This matter is continued for a period of four months.

By her words in the alleged transcript, Judge Gibbons indicates that Allison Morelli is an alcoholic. Later you see:

NAME REDACTED: You know, in the course of having custody evaluation, it was discovered that I had developed a drinking problem as a result of gastric bypass surgery that I had in March of ’09. And that after that point, you know, I suffered from addiction transference and, you know, it — I am certainly not going to minimize that today, that of course it impacted the children. But the children saw me intoxicated four times in the course of two years. And I am in treatment. I attend AA meetings.

To date I have not seen anybody disputing the legitimacy of this transcript. There’s also a second alleged transcript of a June 14, 2011 hearing available. I’d like to have some reasonably easy way to quickly authenticate such documents with court records, but apparently the Pennsylvania courts don’t publish such court records online.

The website had a lot to say about the “PEW” character over the years. “PEW” was alleged to be an emotional child abuser, harasser, abusive litigator, perjurer, frequent violator of court orders, and was suspected by Anthony and Misty of suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder.

If Allison Morelli didn’t do such things, then why on earth would she be arguing that the site is about her? And if she did so such things, why on earth would she want the public to hear about it by publicly claiming the site is about her?

If Anthony and Misty believe that PEW behaved so abusively, regardless of who PEW is, those familiar with such destructive situations should be able to understand why they would have been motivated to write anonymously about such conflicts.

Later in the transcript, Gibbons talks about incarcerating the father if he does not follow her orders, apparently including the ones regarding the illegal restrictions on his free speech rights and the illegal orders made regarding his partner’s website:
Read more…

I’ve been meaning to publish a review of Welcome Back Pluto: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Parental Alienation for some time now. Having watched it myself and with some children who are targets of parental alienation, I think it is a very helpful video for most kids who are at risk for alienation but who have not yet been totally turned against parent they are being encouraged to hate.

There are a lot of positive reviews of this video on Amazon, I’d encourage you to read them. Instead of simply rehashing the universally positive general comments about the video, I’m going to outline chapter by chapter what you’ll see when you watch it so you can better understand what Dr. Warshak is trying to accomplish with this video.

Chapter 1 – What is Alienation?

This first chapter explains what parental alienation is and what it isn’t. It makes it clear that even though it sounds like it has something to do with space aliens, it has nothing to do with this. It explains alienation in the general sense, that people can hate a person, their government, or their family. It breaks down the level of alienation in levels via the terms disillusioned, alienated, and estranged. It also explains that alienation can be realistic, such as when somebody has been very cruel for a long time, or unrealistic when the rejected person was once loved but now is not despite not having done anything to justify this.

I often use the term “target parent” to refer to what the video calls the “rejected parent”, in part because I’ve observed that such parents are often not only targeted for alienation but also for defamation, false accusations, harassment, intimidation, and more by the parties who are out to harm them and the children’s relationships with them.
Read more…

If you’ve been going through a nasty divorce or child custody battle that has lasted years, it’s likely you have experienced a great deal of chronic stress. Years of such stress can create devastating health problems that are often misunderstood and inadequately treated. The stress of dealing with a high-conflict co-parent is particularly likely to badly damage a person’s health as the troubles often continue until well after the children grow into adulthood. But often medical professionals treat these problems as merely mental health issues when in fact there has been significant physiological to the body. This article points out some of the common symptoms of the physiological damage and refers you to additional reading on medical tests that can help you determine appropriate treatment for such conditions.

Personality Disorders and “High Conflict Personalities” Can Cause Severe Mental and Medical Damage

Parents who are dealing with a person who appears to suffer from a personality disorder such as Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, Antisocial, or Paranoid personality disorders are particularly prone to devastating health effects. Often these people engage in parental alienation child abuse such as by blocking the children from contact with a capable or loving parent and trying to force the children to hate that parent. The children are clearly being abused along with the target parent. It’s entirely possible that the young ones will develop mental and physiological injuries from this abuse, too.

Some are literally driven to their deaths by years of abuse. A few even commit suicide to escape it. Others end up on work disability and require expensive medical care for many years. Yet for them, the symptoms still linger for even decades because often medical professionals treat these people as if they are simply suffering from “major depression” or “generalized anxiety disorder” when in fact they are physiologically very ill and in need of medical care, not just counseling and psychotherapy.

Common Symptoms of Physiological Damage from Chronic Stress

The following symptoms are often signs of long-term damage to the stress management systems in the body. Every one of them can result from damage to the adrenal glands after they have been forced to pump out vast quantities of cortisol for years trying to help you cope with the ex’s harassment and attacks.
Read more…

We’ve recently received a FL-325 document for a San Diego family law case involving ill-reputed custody evaluator Stephen Doyne. The source, Dr. Emad Tadros of the California Coalition for Families and Children, states that he has verified the authenticity of this document. Apparently the party who provided him this document does not want the names of the family members disclosed at this time.

According to the family law rules for custody evaluation as expressed on this form, Doyne was to have signed and filed the FL-325 form no more than 10 days after appointment and before beginning work on the case. He was appointed to this case on August 27, 2008, but the information on the form indicates he did not sign it until more than a year later on September 30, 2009. If this document is legitimate as is claimed, it appears to be further evidence of misconduct by Doyne and the San Diego family law court system.
Read more…

After hearing yet another friend discuss how it is impossible to live happily or even function due the many years of continuing chaos being caused by his children’s mother and the parental alienation she inflicts upon them, I was alarmed but not surprised to hear him say that he’s about to give up on all his kids. I can’t say on blame him, he has been trying for years to simply be a part of his children’s lives and is attacked and persecuted relentlessly for simply wanting to be an involved parent. The damage caused by the combination of a parental alienator and the government bullies who support and reward this and other abusive conduct by bad parents, be they abusive mothers or abusive fathers, is immense. It eats away at your peace of mind, burns holes in your soul, and drains your finances to near bankruptcy over the years. You are left but a battered shell of a person with an empty wallet unable to enjoy anything in life, unable to even have a moment of peace and contentment.

Then I remembered something I just read from our friends at CopBlock, a great web site that discusses police brutality and misconduct across the United States. CopBlock suggested that we all spend some time on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to remember the travails and tactics of the African-American leader who put the nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience tactics of India’s Gandhi into action in the United States. Civil disobedience is a just and fair suggestion for a means of action for parents being afflicted by the American courts and law enforcement and their near universal support for parental alienation, family terrorism, false accusations, and many other crimes against children and families.

Parents who are being pushed to the limit like my friend should engage in civil disobedience and rally their families and friends to do the same. Simply stop cooperating with the government. Stop paying your taxes and stop funding a system that abuses and terrorizes millions of innocent children and their loving parents. Start protesting all you can against bully judges and corrupt politicians who do nothing to protect children and good parents who are being victimized by psychologically brutal attackers in the form of alienating parents, CPS social workers, family law attorneys, and the many other criminals who scheme to use and abuse children to make a profit. Or maybe just vote with your feet by leaving the United States as it increasingly appears to be an irredeemably sick nation that persecutes good parents and innocent children in the name of profit and power of the government and its friends.
Read more…

Each year a new set of 19 San Diego citizens is seated as the San Diego Grand Jury. Applications for the 2011 / 2012 Grand Jury are now being accepted through January 14, 2011. The Grand Jury could be hugely helpful to cleaning up the mess in San Diego’s courts, but despite the evidence of widespread misconduct particularly in the family law courts, the current and past Grand Juries have been stymied from going after judicial criminals. In this article I aim to point out how this could change if the right people get into the next Grand Jury and are willing to take some personal risks to protect the public from the out-of-control abusive judicial system in the county. If you and your family have been harmed by the government and courts of San Diego, I strongly suggest that you consider taking a year out of your life to get a seat on the Grand Jury and use it to pursue the government criminals who are harming and destroying so many families in the county.

Grand Juries Stymied from Investigating Courts

California’s county Grand Juries are tasked with investigating and reporting on problems in county and local governments. However, the San Diego County Grand Jury has been effectively prohibited from investigating the San Diego Superior Court itself for a variety of reasons. Aside from whatever legal technicalities there may be for this, it is clear there is a strong motivation for the government officials who control the county to prevent investigation of the court system itself. The government wants naive citizens to believe that the courts in the county are fair and obey the law when neither is true.

The San Diego Superior Court is filled with abuse, corruption, illegal conduct, and disreputable judges such as drunk driver Lisa Schall, cover-up scam artist Lorna Alksne, abusive Christine Goldsmith with her nepotistic control over the San Diego City Attorney, and TV-star-wannabe DeAnn Salcido (who recently resigned over her misconduct) that the Grand Jury would literally have to investigate most judges for misconduct and eventually verbally eviscerate the judiciary and file criminal indictments against many of them to even get a start on cleaning up the corrupt mess that these judges wish to remain hidden.

Many of these judges and court officials have ties to other “civil servants” such as San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, Sheriff William Gore, and others who use the courts and government offices as their personal playthings to harm their opponents and critics alike. Consequently, there is every intent by the government to hide the widespread judicial corruption and lawlessness. Aside from keeping secret their illicit plans and connections, they also endeavor to maintain their tyrannical grip on power by attacking and marginalizing their victims. They do this because if the public were to understand how many people have been badly harmed by the lawless tyrants seated in government positions throughout San Diego, there might be a public uprising against them.
Read more…

Constitutional law attorney Leon Koziol has filed a parental civil rights lawsuit alleging willful and harmful violations of the US and New York Constitutions and civil rights laws by New York courts and government agencies involving their mistreatment of parents and children. After reading the very long list of complaints regarding alleged corrupt and illegal actions by judges, government employees, and police officers and a pattern of retaliation against Koziol for exercising his First Amendment free speech rights to criticize government officials and the people they employ for their pattern of abuse and misconduct, it appears the pattern of retaliation for legitimate complaints is remarkably similar to what is done to many other parents who go up against criminals employed by the government.

Koziol has lost his children, his legal career, and much of his income and property apparently due to the systematic abuse alleged to have been executed by several of the defendants as they attempted to terrorize, harass, threaten, and coerce Koziol to stop his complaints against them.

The defendants include a long list of primarily New York state and county government officials but also includes US federal government Secretary DHHS Kathleen Sebelius:
Read more…